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The 12 Most Useful Social Bookmarking & Autoposting Tools for Your Blog
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
As bloggers, we’re always trying to encourage our readers to post our blogs to one of the many social bookmarking services… be it digg, delicious, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon or one of the myriad others. There are many different wordpress plugins for different social sites. The problem is that your blog ends up cluttered with all of those buttons, and it really gets annoying.
The solution has been the plugins that allow you to post to any or many of the social networks. Here’s an overview of all of the ones that I’ve found (with some of my lovely comments to boot). One of the most popular players - sharethis, has received $15 million dollars in funding!
USA Today’s Steve Strauss Encourages Small Business Owners to have Blogs
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008John Janstch alerted me to an article in the USA Today online that adresses whether business owners should have blogs.
Steve Strauss gives 5 reasons a small business owner should have a blog:
- You help build a sense of community - in other words, you build a relationship with the customer, so they see you as a real person… not just a webpage
- They allow you to plug products
- They help with SEO - I use the blog here solely for SEO (as well as to get new clients - I’ll get to the plug at the end
)
17 Useful Wordpress SEO and other plugins
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008- All in One SEO Pack - This is an absolutely vital plugin for every blog that you have. This allows you to change your Title, description and keyword metatags on each blog post to make them unique, as well as to make a default home page title and description. I credit this plugin with about 30% of the credit for my rankings on some of my keywords.
- AutoMeta - This tag kind of conflicts with the All-in-one SEO packplugin, as it automatically creates the titles and descriptions. I still have to see how this works with All-in-One SEO pack
Top 3 Questions from SmallBusiness Owners About Online Marketing
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Local Business Owner Three Biggest Questions about search – and the answers:
1) Do people really search for local services online?
2) Can I afford to get traffic from the internet?
Blogging for Yourself, the User and the Search Engine - a 2008 resolution
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008As you may or may not know, I am a big believer in blogging. It is a valuable way of
1)expressing your personality,
2)creating a connection with your users, and
3)getting valuable SE ranking.
The question is which one comes first? You might think this is a trivial question. It’s not.When I started blogging on About Results Marketing, I had merely bought a cool expiring domain for something I had wanted to do in the future - consulting in SEO, SEM and online marketing.
Facebook (Stupidly) Takes the Heat from Moveon, while Yahoo and Ebay laugh to the bank!
Thursday, December 13th, 2007So we all know about the Facebook Debacle with Beacon - and the horrible mistakes stupid 24 year olds make (We really do love you Mark Zuckerburg) it’s just that young kids shouldn’t be running $15 billion dollar businesses.
Moveon.org and the EFF have been decrying the privacy issues. As I’ve stated in a previous post, I think that behavioral targeting is inevitable and coming soon. In fact, I wasn’t happy that Mike Morgan from Tacoda was being apologetic about it.
Should an Ecommerce Website Have a Blog?
Thursday, December 6th, 2007(Disclaimer: I am extremely biased towards blogs. I have already come to the conclusion that blogs are always beneficial. Consider yourself warned!)
Here are the issues:
- What are the pro’s and con’s of having a blog on your ecommerce site (The Theory)
- What are the other experts in the field saying about having blogs on your ecommerce site
- What are the big guys doing?
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What are the Pro’s and Con’s of having a Blog on your Ecommerce site?
Los Angeles Internet Marketing - A Local Business Directory
Sunday, November 25th, 2007As you probably know, getting links to your website is the all important thing in getting better rankings (if you have an optimized website first, that is).
Many people use article directories, press releases, putting blog links on other blogs etc.
As a small business owner, there is a very valuable and often overlooked factor - getting your business listed in the local business directoriesI am in the midst of creating a list of sites to submit your business to, for local marketing. I’ve already mentioned a great resource in the Local Search Optimization post.
Is the LA Times Getting Closer to “Getting It”?
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007This is a follow up to my first post on the LA Times’s efforts to go “Web 2.0″, after meeting with Eric Ulken at a blogger’s event.
First off, a little disclaimer… My site is ugly, doesn’t convert, and definitely is not “cool”. So I really should have no right to criticize other companies’ efforts to “get it”. Especially since the LA Time site isn’t to badly designed. It has a pretty minimalist design, and very easy to find links.
Market Your Business Through Referrals, John Jantsch
Sunday, November 18th, 2007 “I
get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a
referral
plan.”
~ Scott Hensley - Affordable Concrete Cutting
Today
I want to share with you, in it’s entirety, a copy of a letter I
received from a small business owner who implemented a number of
suggestions I gave him in the Duct Tape Marketing book.
I chose to share this not to point out how brilliant I am - writing this stuff is the easy part sometimes
- but to showcase how acting on what you read - the really hard part - can payhuge dividends.
Could Consumers Really Accept Behavioral Targeting?
Friday, November 2nd, 2007I am a regular reader of Mediapost’s many daily newsletters. It really allows me to cover the industry on a day-to-day basis, as well as get the thoughts of some of the foremost decision makers in our industry. (I highly suggest that you sign up.)
Anyway, so today, we have a post from Dave Morgan, the founder of Tacoda. His claim was that despite their “highly publicized” opt out campaign, not many people took advantage.
MySpace Marketing Still Work? Getting a “Guru’s” Attention…
Tuesday, October 16th, 20071) Does MySpace Marketing Still work?
About six month ago, I went to my first - and currently only, “Internet Marketing” seminar. I met this amazing twelfth grade high school kid that was making a hell of a lot more than I was using just myspace marketing.
However, he mentioned that he was starting to research other topics, as he felt that the myspace legality issues were precarious. If they start prohibiting certain messaging etc, it would negatively affect the ability to do (affiliate) marketing on myspace. (Obviously, bands aren’t going to have a problem promoting themselves).
Beware!!! Biased Companies “Research” Supports Product…Part 2 - Pay-Per-Call?? The Click Fraud Solution???
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007I was going to do a post on Yahoo’ s smartads press releases, as well as the Atlas’s Research that conveniently came up right beforehand. Hmm… both services not in as much in the SEM field as much as in the…. you got it - banner and rich media advertising… Hmmm correlation?
(Unfortunately, that idea seems to have fallen flat. The sad part is, that although the concept was a good one - someone in PR at Yahoo just doesn’t know how to promote it. It will remain a little gold mine for the marketer that cares.)
The Newbie secret… A coaching program from Codrut Torcanu
Sunday, July 29th, 2007So I signed up for the Newbie secret Platinum… Why?
Well, first why not?
Here are the reasons why not. I don’t generally buy ebooks anymore. I used to buy thousands. I still stay on the lists of people pushing ebooks, and I look at the sales letters sometimes - but I don’t buy too much. Frankly, I have a high BS detector, and most of the information in the ebooks I pretty much know myself. I’m simply looking for a step - by - system to implement all of the random scattered knowledge that I know works. Plus, many of the times, the authors use a nice “bait-n-switch” on you in salesletters.
Getting Back to the Basics - There’s a right way and a wrong one…
Thursday, July 26th, 2007At work in the past couple of weeks, our battle plan has been changed - to have my boss work on the PPC management, and I would work on expansion. However, some of the expansion things have had their hangups- as they rightfully would. My boss’s new mantra now (his original one - to be honest) is about going back to the basics… Test test test.
The truth is, that that is a great strategy. However, it really goes back to what you are testing for. If you test random things without a plan, you are going nowhere. You start with a vision, then you can kick ass.